Argentine energy executive praises China's role in energy transition

The scale of China's energy buildout is lowering the cost of the global energy transition and the biggest benefits will go to countries that build long-term partnerships with China, an Argentine energy executive said.

"What I witnessed in China is not only an energy transition — it's an industrial reinvention happening at a speed the rest of the world has never seen," Doris Capurro, founder and CEO of LUFT Energia SA and Terra Oil, two Argentina-based energy investment companies, told China Daily following a recent visit to China.

Capurro said electrification in China has become so woven into daily life that people no longer experience it as a transition, but simply as how things work. Green-plate electric vehicles now outnumber blue-plate gasoline cars on many of the country's streets, she noted, adding that Chinese companies "didn't just lower costs — they reset what the rest of the industry considers normal".

Clean energy accounted for 36.8 percent of power generation by industrial enterprises above designated size in the first three quarters of this year, up 0.9 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Under the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), the share of non-fossil energy in total consumption is targeted at 25 percent by 2030.

"China's biggest contribution to the developing world hasn't been the technology itself — it's made that technology affordable enough to actually deploy," Capurro said. For a country like Argentina, affordability "is the line between a project that gets built and one that stays a slide in a deck", she added.

An inclusive energy transition cannot just mean importing cheaper panels, she said — it must include technology transfer, local jobs, workforce training and domestic industrial capability, "otherwise we're trading one form of dependency for another". China's new-energy exports can benefit economies at almost any stage of development, she said.

China brings technology, capital and experience building infrastructure at scale, while Argentina has oil and gas, lithium, copper and world-class wind and solar resources, Capurro said. "That's not a trade relationship — that's the raw material for a real partnership."

She said transmission should come first. Argentina's best wind resource is in Patagonia, far from the country's demand centers, and its grid cannot move that power — transmission has become the main bottleneck for new renewable projects. China, by contrast, has built the world's largest high-voltage transmission network. Bringing in Chinese transmission technology and capital would allow Argentina to connect far more wind and solar power to its own grid.

Looking ahead, artificial intelligence, storage and modern transmission are becoming "the main event" of the transition, she said, shifting competition from who controls a resource to who can combine it with intelligence and execution — so "being a late starter in resources doesn't mean being a late starter in value".

Capurro also praised two decades of "long-range planning, infrastructure investment and industrial policy" in China, saying capital "that thinks in decades needs predictability that thinks in decades too".

The next chapter of cooperation should be measured not deal by deal but by how many partnerships are still standing in ten years. "Shared prosperity was never going to come from trade volume alone," she said. "It comes from relationships that combine investment, innovation and jobs."

Wang Yubo contributed to this story.